BIODiMod: A dialogic process of making sense of biodiversity through modelling-based teaching in secondary education

BERMUDEZ, GONZALO M. A.; GARCÍA, LÍA P.; CISNERO, K.

Bologna

Conferencia; 13th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association; 2019

ESERA - European Science Education Research Association

Science education has acknowledged the need to consider modelling as a key process in teaching and learning. Despite scientific modelling has been gaining traction within science education studies, there is relatively little research on the modelling of biological diversity. Our goal was to better understand teacher and students? modelling-related talk when constructing and reaching consensus on subrogant representations of biodiversity. We further aimed to identify how the teacher allowed the construction of a shared understanding and the occurrence of metamodeling talk. We report on four recursive analytical categories that were inductively identified in our registers of an instructional unit, which included fieldwork and classroom biodiversity modelling (32 students, 17-18 years old). The findings show that the representations of biodiversity became increasingly complex, integrating more and more components, and bridging the abstract, material and real planes of the model through different pathways. Teacher?s role was characterised by a continuous guidance and dialogic inquiry, by which students were able to hypothesise, predict, describe and explain phenomena related to ecosystem processes in the context of a socioscientific issue.